Patricia Arquette Interview on ‘Severance’ and ‘Lost Highway’

After nearly three years, “Severance,” one of 2022’s most famous shows, is finally returning. The critically acclaimed series, which explores the sci-fi extremes of work-life balance, begins its ten-episode second season on January 17. Patricia Arquette, who earned an Emmy nomination for her role as the calculating Harmony Cobel, returns to play the office manager who stalks her employees outside the company. As the air date approaches, Arquette is excited but hesitant to open up too much about what’s in store. “I don’t really carry characters with me, or I try very hard not to, but ‘Severance’ is different,” she told IndieWire.

“When people ask me to play Harmony Cobel or ‘Severance,’ this little thing comes into my mind and I just want to lie to them,” she said with a wry smile. “So whatever I say, I wouldn’t count on it.”

One thing fans of the series can count is that the production of the second season had a very different atmosphere than the first. “When we shot (season one), it was during Covid, before there were vaccines or anything,” Arquette said. “We wore plastic face shields and masks and we were all separated. You couldn’t joke with anyone, so there was a kind of weird dystopian separation. At the time I thought, ‘I don’t think anyone wants to watch this right now.’ I was very pleasantly surprised when it connected with so many people.”

The anticipation for its second season has been drawn out for fans. SZA spoke for many when she tweeted last May that she wanted season 2 “right now as hell,” prompting Stiller to reply, “oh okay got it.” Several months later, before the release of the first eight minutes, an official synopsis of the new season promised that the employees “learned the dire consequences of joking with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path.”

For Arquette, the concept of a split self goes far beyond the workplace. “I think there are a lot of people who are cut off all around us,” she said. “People who have affairs get disconnected, people who are criminals and liars and even normal people can be disconnected in many, many ways. So I think it’s an interesting thing to look at. Maybe it resonates with a lot of people people.”

It’s a concept that definitely resonates with her. Born in Chicago, Arquette was the daughter of actress and dancer Mardi Nowak and actor Lewis Arquette, best known for playing a mercurial manager JD Pickett in the television series “The Waltons”. Mardi’s temper and Lewis’ alcoholism meant that home life was turbulent and often violent for her and her siblings. By the time she was 17, Arquette’s sister Alexis had made her screen debut in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” younger brother David was on his way to an acting career of his own, and older sister Rosanna had co-starred with Madonna in the film “Desperately Seeking Susan ,” and in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.”

“For me, it was actually an organized effort to get brave enough to act,” Arquette said. “Although I was a little bit spunky, I was also very shy. I have struggled with codependency in my life and tried to appease other people. Some people can be very assertive, I don’t have that kind of bravery. I feel like it’s an ongoing effort to figure out what I want.”

Arquette began both her television and film careers in 1987 with memorable appearances in “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” and “Daddy,” a TV movie that has since been used in high school health classes to educate about the dangers of teenage pregnancy .

“When I was 18, I graduated high school and I didn’t know if I wanted to be an actor or a midwife,” she said. “I looked at that choice and I said to myself, ‘more than being an actor or a midwife, I want to be brave. I’m going to choose to try to be an actor so I can experience failure and rejection and I can keep trying to show up and push through.’ I gave myself a year. Every day I studied a film, or I went to an audition. Sometimes I got terrible answers, literally the worst feedback you could ever get, like, ‘This is the worst actor , we have ever seen. Why did you send her to us?’ But I actually got work. Because of my desire to fail, my desire to be brave, I started getting jobs.”

In 1990, she appeared in guest roles on the television series “Thirtysomething” and “Tales from the Crypt” before starring in the decade-defining films “True Romance”, “Ed Wood” and “Flirting With Disaster”.

Of her performances during the 1990s, few have endured more than her dual role in David Lynch’s 1997 film “Lost Highway.” Arquette has spoken about the difficulties she faced playing Renee, the suspicious wife of Bill Pullman’s saxophonist Fred Madison, and Alice Wakefield, wife of mobster Mr. Eddy and femme fatale to the young man Pullman’s character turns into halfway through the film after Fred is imprisoned for Renee’s murder.

In a review typical of many at the time, Roger Ebert wrote of Arquette’s roles, “we don’t feel it’s a surreal joke. We feel—I don’t know, I think I felt jerked around. ” Ebert also expressed discomfort with the scene where Alice is forced to undress at gunpoint, a scene she herself struggled to shoot. Despite its Trent Reznor-produced soundtrack album charting in the top 10 and positive reviews for Arquette’s performance, “Lost Highway” was a box office disappointment. As with many films that deepen with repeated viewings and don’t offer easy resolutions, Lynch’s film has undergone critical reappraisal, something Arquette is thrilled to discover.

“Really?” she said with wide eyes of surprise. “I’m so happy to hear it’s being appreciated because I think it’s a really, really interesting film.” Unprompted, she recalls her experiences on set. “As an actress, David doesn’t give you a lot of information. So I’d say, ‘David, am I playing two people? Is this a ghost?’ And he would say,’ she adopts Lynch’s voice, ‘What do you think, Patrish?'” she smiles. “So I had to come up with my own logic. I decided that we look at women through the eyes of a misogynist, but one who is awake enough to know that he shouldn’t think this way. It’s almost become a subconscious part of him,” she widens her eyes before launching into her interpretation of the film that has puzzled so many viewers.

“When he kills her, he can’t reconcile it in his mind, so he imagines himself as this ordinary guy, an innocent young mechanic,” she said. “But then he meets her again, and she wants him, and now they are in love. But even then, to him, she’s a whore. Because in the mind of a misogynist, a narcissist, you will always be a monster.”

When Lynch explained that “Lost Highway” was inspired by the televised trial of OJ Simpson, many dismissed the observation as more weirdness from the “Twin Peaks” creator, who frustrated millions of Americans by refusing to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer until they disappointed them by doing so. exactly that. For Arquette, the parallels are clear.

“David wrote ‘Lost Highway’ during the OJ Simpson case. If you saw it live, at a certain point you saw OJ start to believe his own lie,” she lowers her speech, recalling. “You started to see him almost . .. imagine it all gone. Like, ‘what an innocent I am.’ It was very strange to observe. I feel like there are a lot of elements of that in this film.”

While talking about her memories of “Lost Highway,” Arquette notes the similarities between the “innies” and “outies” in “Severance,” and her roles as Renee and Alice. Aside from the challenges of Covid, Arquette’s experiences working with the cast and crew of the Apple TV+ series have been positive. Working on Lynch’s set required a level of bravery that the shy girl from Chicago hadn’t pulled off before.

“It was the hardest film for me to make because I’ve always been very shy,” she said cautiously. “Especially sexually. I guess I’ve had a lot of trauma. Even when I was little, I never wanted anyone to look at me naked. For many years I would even take a bath in the dark, alone with just a candle. “For me, doing ‘Lost Highway’ was one of the bravest things I could have done. I was so tired of carrying this burden of horror, this fear,” she says, her voice rising from a near whisper. “It was a very strong film for me to make. I kind of met my own shadow.”

Season 2 of “Severance” premieres on Apple TV+ on January 17.